The day I was supposed to join a group of young women to map Gros Islet, an old fishing village on the Caribbean Island of St. Lucia, I got lost. Proann Francis, who was helping lead the expedition, had told me to meet everyone at Care Growell School, which Google Maps informed me was some 8,500 miles away, in Uttar Pradesh, India. “Where?” I asked. She instructed me to wait outside my hotel for a ride because it would be impossible to find the place on my own. An hour later, I found myself standing at the side of a dusty St. Lucian highway as a vintage red Toyota van pulled up. I squeezed in, between Francis and the driver. Behind us, a group of young women sat wearing matching light blue shirts that read “Women Mappers.”
“We have some heavy mapping to do today!” Francis announced, breaking into a toothy smile, her dark hair pulled back neatly into a bun.
Most of St. Lucia, which sits at the southern end of an archipelago stretching from Trinidad and Tobago to the Bahamas, is poorly mapped. Aside from strips of sandy white beaches that hu... Read more
